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(Ted Crow, The Plain Dealer)
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Growing up, you could say I ate traditional meals on Thanksgiving – with the emphasis on the plural meals.
While I helped by staying out of the kitchen and watching college football and an NFL game, my mother controlled the cooking. She cut, she stirred, she sliced, she baked.
First course: A broth with pastina, tiny pieces of pasta that work well in soup. Sometimes she would opt for wedding soup. Antipasto would come out next – cold cuts, roasted peppers, artichokes and tomatoes. Then came the lasagna – never meat, always cheese – a few inches thick with gravy (we never called it sauce).
Call him Marc, but don't call him late to dinner.
Now, the lasagna is where I would get in trouble. The approach you had to take here involved pacing and moderation. Each year, I swore to myself I could do it, I could eat a small portion of each course, and restrain myself.
But the lasagna always did me in.
"Umm, I'll take another piece please," I would hear myself say. And then, magically, I was full.
"I didn't put meat in it, because I figured that would be too much," Mom recalled recently.
That is akin to taking off a cherry from an ice-cream sundae and calling it a light dessert.
(Journalistic disclosure here: I was a fat kid. There isn't any other way to put it. When you're on a strict carb-limit diet when you're 11 years old and have been weaned on pasta, well, you're fat. The women in the 'husky' department in the boys section of Sears knew me the way bartenders greet regulars at bars. The 'phase,' as I have been told I was in, lasted a year. Felt like a lifetime.)
So now comes the turkey and its requisite side dishes: Stuffing, vegetables, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce. A break, then pumpkin pie. After we took a few breaths to relax, the mixed nuts came out, my father cracking them with the deft touch of a seasoned pro, a veteran of marathon holiday meals. And then – and this is a very Italian thing – fruit.
Fruit is on every table of every Italian family's home. All of my cousins had a bowl of fruit on the table. If they didn't have real fruit, they had wax fruit. Nothing is more attractive than dusty wax fruit as your centerpiece.
The greatest part of the meal came the next day - leftovers. We could feed a small city for weeks with what we had. Nothing ever went to waste.
Looking back, my mother recently pondered the countless dishes in the kitchen and came through with one of the most obvious statements ever: "That was a tiring meal to make."
Here's the funny thing: You might think it was a meal for 10 or 12, but it was only four of us – Mom, Dad, my sister and me. Occasionally my grandmother was visiting, and she would be the fifth. Every now and then cousins would be over.
We had other traditional meals. My father spent a rare turn in the kitchen cooking a fish dinner on Christmas Eve, and on New Year's Day - while I again sacrificed by staying out of the kitchen and watching football - my mother would make zeppole, a deep-fried dough concoction, topped with powdered sugar.
But nothing matched the magnitude of our Italian-American Thanksgiving.